possibly amongst the purer Sumero-Phænician colonists and their descendants, just as the really alphabetic inscriptions of about the seventh century B.C. onwards found at Abydos, Abu Simbel, etc. were inscribed by Phœnician, Carian and other mercenaries or colonists. As apparently an exceptional occurrence, in the nineteenth Dynasty (c. 1350-1200 B.C.) are found some alphabetic letter-signs for continuous writing on "ostraka" or earthenware, but they are mixed with hieroglyphs and "aphonic" signs. [1] The "hieratic" was a local cursive form of the hieroglyphs, several hundreds in number, of which "only two" have been authoritatively admitted to resemble decidedly alphabetic letters; and "demotic" was a further abbreviated form of the hieratic.
In Mesopotamia, in the post-Sumerian period, and in the "Akkad" rule of Sargon and his successors, the Babylonian, Kassi and other dynasties and the Assyrians, no attempt is evident at spelling words otherwise than syllabically, and usually by bi-consonantal signs. And no indigenous alphabetic writing has been found in use there until the very late date of about the fifth century B.C., when writing in the "Semitic" Phœnician or "Aramean" was used by merchants for keeping their accounts in their business documents.
The origin of the alphabetic system of writing presumably arose amongst a section of the Sumerian or Aryan race outside Mesopotamia, who wrote habitually in linear style on parchment or wood with pen and ink, which tended to form a more abbreviated and simpler cursive shape of the linear signs. One such community, I have shown, was the Sumerian merchant colony in the Indus Valley, as evidenced by the linear writing on their seals, which seals of the "stamp" type with linear style of writing and their associated cultured objects generally resembled, as I
- ↑ PA. 10 and frontispiece.
